Events Calendar

Alfred E.Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering - Seminar series

Speaker: Dr. Remo Rohs, Ph.D., Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy and Computer Science, University of Southern California

Talk Title: Engineering+: AI-driven discovery in biology

Abstract: In recent years, research in biology has become increasingly quantitative. This trend is due to two major drivers: Biology now generates large amounts of data in every experiment, and the power of computers has grown exponentially. The combination of data and computing is the basis of biological discovery in the 21st century. This talk will introduce AI-based and other computational methods developed in the Rohs lab with the goal to answer important biological questions related to gene regulation, nucleic acid structure, protein-nucleic acid binding, and drug design. These computational approaches combine biophysics, mathematics, and statistical machine learning. They enable, for instance, the probing a protein for its preference to bind either DNA or RNA or allow for the design of novel drug-like molecules that are not available in current drug libraries. Feature engineering is a crucial factor for the interpretability of these models. The talk will provide a vision for the crucial role of computational biology at the interface of engineering, medicine, and science.

Biography: Biography:Remo Rohs is the founding chair of the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology. He received his undergraduate and master’s degree in physics at Humboldt University Berlin. His Ph.D. in chemistry is from Free University Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany. Remo Rohs did his postdoctoral training in structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He received further training in computational biology and bioinformatics as research scientist at Columbia University in New York. Remo Rohs started his independent faculty career at the University of Southern California in 2010. He received tenure and was promoted to associated professor in 2016 and to full professor in the same year. He became head of the computational biology and bioinformatics faculty in 2016, founded a section of quantitative and computational biology in 2018, and his current department in 2021. He also designed the quantitative biology undergraduate major. His research is primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Host: Stecey Finley

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Carla Stanard